While the disclosure described herein relates in general to reels for storing all types of tubing for convenience sake, it will be discussed herein in terms of its application to hose reels.
Traditional mechanical hose reels, even for industrial applications, provided direct hand-cranked systems with bearings to assist in the rewind. These systems provided spools for housing the hose mounted on a frame supported between two axial bearing assemblies with a crank means located at one end.
To further assist in the rewinding procedure, hoses are frequently wound on spring-loaded reels, the arrangement being that the hose, when it is to be used, is drawn out from the reel against the action of a spring and fixed at any given length by a locking means of some type.
When the reel is to be rewound, the locking means is released and the spring acts to rotate the reel and rewind the hose.
Spring motor reels have also commonly been used in garages and other work shop environments, particularly in mining and heavy industry maintenance applications.
Once the reel is fully rewound, the spring will almost be in a relaxed state except for the smallest amount of tension to simply keep the hose fully wound to a stop point at the cable end.
There is an associated problem, however, in that the controlled rewind speed of the hose or cable is dependent on the operator maintaining control of the hose end and allowing for slow rewind of the hose by applying a resistance to the rewind process by keeping hold of the hose itself.
If the hose is accidentally released by the operator while still being mostly unwound, then it will rewind of its own accord in a most violent and rapid manner. It is in these circumstances that serious personal injury can occur to personnel near the reel or that damage can occur to the reel apparatus or other items in the vicinity of the reel and hose.
As a result, various attempts have been made to provide speed control devices for use in association with such reels.
Most of these are concerned with a viscous type device for speed control or use an air motor or hydraulic motor in a reverse fashion by applying a restriction to the outlet of these devices then, by coupling them to the rotary spool of the reel by some sprocket or gearing method, allowing either a controlled compression of a fluid or air, a controlled metering of fluid or air through an air motor or hydraulic motor, making it work in reverse as a vane compressor or a pump, whereby the resistance to flow at higher metered restricted flow volumes generated by the higher rotational speeds is translated to greater rotational resistance at these higher speeds in order to slow the rotation speed of the spool to a normalized speed.
These methods are expensive and complex and require maintenance and fine tuning, thus working against the original low-cost concept of the spring motor reel itself.